ABSTRACT
Several years ago, when these matters were more fashionable, London’s problematic and contradictory location within the industrial history of the nation received considerable attention. London, it was argued, was unlike so many of the great urban centres of the midlands and the north in that it was not begat of the Industrial Revolution. Despite the fact that London remained the greatest centre of production and consumption, it was seen to possess few of the features that dened the experience of industrialisation. Large factory production and heavy engineering, for example, were conspicuous by their absence. London manufacturing continued to be dominated by small-scale workshops employing fewer than 25 persons because the capital was simply too remote from the sources of coal and iron ore and land was too expensive to allow it to compete successfully with the burgeoning industrial heartlands.1 Thus, although the most important metropolitan industries – clothing, furniture and printing – were mechanised in the course of the nineteenth century by widespread adoption of the sewing machine and the band-saw, the organisation of labour and production remained largely unaffected. J.L. Hammond captured prevailing sentiment when he declared that the Industrial Revolution was a storm cloud that passed over London but broke elsewhere.2
